


Elegiac

by thehollowones



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Bookstores, Friendship, Grief/Mourning, Marauders, Marauders Friendship, Marauders' Era, Multi, Murder Mystery, POV Remus Lupin, Post-First War with Voldemort
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-25
Updated: 2016-09-25
Packaged: 2018-08-17 04:31:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8130464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehollowones/pseuds/thehollowones
Summary: There are no more missions, just a chubby little boy with killing curse eyes and corpses, row on row on row.After the war.





	

Remus sat in the front pew of the church, watching the wintery sunlight take on gaudy hues as it filtered through the stained glass windows. Someone had to sit in the front - James and Lily were orphans - and Alice had volunteered him. Alice perched beside him now with a ballerina’s posture. She was fidgeting with her wand, rolling it back and forth between her fingers. Her head kept whipping around to watch people enter. Her hair was cropped close to her head and her eyes were fierce. She looked deadly.

“Diggle’s here… and the McCulloughs… oh!”

“Petunia What’s-her-name,” Frank supplied from the pew behind them, his deep voice reverberating through Remus’s sternum. Remus’s hands were suddenly damp on his borrowed trousers. He thought they might have been Frank’s. He didn’t own dress trousers.

“Is H-… did she bring-?”

“No.”

“Don’t let her near me,” Remus hissed. “Alice, please!” The whir of the overhead fans and the whispering of the congregants mirrored the quick thrum of his heartbeat.

“I won’t let anyone near you.” Alice sounded tense. The hand not playing with her wand was bunched into a fist on the rough wood between them. Remus knew he should have been touched but when he examined his insides they were an oil slick, leaving him access to no emotions but the quick flare or the dark, sloshing nothingness.

A hush fell, starting at the back of the crowd. Remus closed his eyes and hunched forwards, clasping his hands together. It was, of course, too late to pray. Music started. He recognized it: Adagio for Strings. He lowered his head and adjusted the position of his arms until he could cover his ears with some degree of subtlety.

He lost track of time. His eyes opened, colors smearing, to see Dumbledore standing over two oak coffins, looking grave in deep purple. The lids were shut tight. He gulped in air to keep from puking and screwed his eyes shut again.

There was a warm hand over his own. Alice was beside him, tears sliding into her opened mouth. Frank loomed over her, holding their son with one arm. They hoisted him up and stayed on either side of him until they reached the side door off the altar and slipped out.

“Do you want to attend the burial?” Frank asked. The baby had his hand on Alice’s hair, squirming away from his father, face reddening with effort.

Remus took a careful step backwards. His feet crunched on the frosted grass. The three of them were the only people in sight. “Thank you. Both of you.”

“Don’t you dare,” Alice said, her puffy eyes widening. She was glorious in the sun, all sinew and steel, Frank her perfect counterweight. But _James was in his head, light glinting off the perfect circles of his glasses, eyes aflame, shouting ‘run, run, run!’ The prank had been pulled. It was time to go, his friends and him._

She flung out her arm as he twisted into non-being.

-

He ended up in Abergavenny. He had always liked the word Abergavenny, with its harsh beginning and gentle ending. He was in an alleyway. There was an itch on his left palm and he looked down to see a row of angry crescent marks, one of which had leaked blood. He wiped his hand off on his robes. Then he looked around at his dingy surroundings, uncertain of what to do next.

 _Triage_ , Remus thought. _Like a mission gone wrong. Except there will be no more missions, just a chubby little boy with killing curse eyes and corpses, row on row on row._ He retched over a pile of filthy cardboard, bringing up nothing. _Triage._

The first thing to do was ditch his robes. He pulled them off and tossed them into the graffiti-ed dumpster to his left, leaving him shivering in his thin white button up and trousers. He decided to keep his wand, tucked safely in his pocket. The next thing he needed, _what he’d always needed, his mother’s shoulders shaking at the dining room table,_ was money.

He walked for hours, head bent against the chill wind. He saw many signs, but none were attached to buildings he could bear to be contained in. Remus was not a butcher or a baker or a part-time Tesco cashier. The sky had started to darken and cloud before he came across what he was looking for.

The window was stamped ARIADNE’S BOOKS in large gold letters, slightly chipped at the edges. A tattered flyer in the lower left-hand corner implored him to ‘shop local!’ When Remus entered, he was confronted with a floor to ceiling bookshelf, forcing him to turn to the left. A teenage girl poked her head around the corner. Her eyes were large in her too thin face.

“Yeah?”

“I’m looking for a job.”

“Not hiring.” She tossed her head dismissively. Her hair was black, obviously a dye job as blonde roots were starting to appear on her crown.

“I’ll work long hours, evenings and weekends, for less than is legal.”

She considered him, drumming her fingernails on the copy of The Thorn Birds she was holding. “Who’s your favorite author?”

“Dostoevsky.”

“What do you think of Jane Austen?”

Remus opted for the truth. “I think she’s very smart and very funny.”

“Ariadne!” the girl yelled. “Ariadne!”

The sound of a door slamming echoed from behind the bookshelf, followed by hurried footsteps. A middle aged woman in an oatmeal colored jumper came to stand beside the girl, who had to turn sideways to accommodate her. Remus was starting to find what little he could see of the store claustrophobic. The girl, who was now regarding him in a friendlier way, pointed at Remus.

“He likes Dostoevsky and Austen. I want to keep him.”

“I thought something was on fire.” The woman, who had been wringing her hands, looked up at the ceiling, her body sagging in evident relief. She recovered herself and held out a cold hand to shake Remus’s. “I’m Ariadne. I apologize for Clara, she’s enthusiastic.”

Clara huffed. “Tell her the part about working evenings and weekends.”

“I know you’re not hiring,” Remus said, “but I’ll work any time you want for anything you can spare.”

Ariadne looked worriedly at him. This seemed to be her default expression, as her face relaxed into it. Up close, Remus could tell that she hadn’t washed her hair recently. She pulled absently at one of her curls, looking at Clara, who nodded towards Remus and mouthed ‘Dostoevsky.’

“I suppose, we close at five, but I suppose we could extend our hours until nine? The holidays…God knows we have enough money to hire.” She sounded bitter. Clara, who had been rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet, went still.

“I’m Remus,” he said into the silence. “Remus… Watson.”

“I take it we’re paying you under the table, Remus Watson?” asked Ariadne, looking sharply at him. Remus fought against looking guilty, causing himself to nod a beat too late. Ariadne’s eyes softened.

“Welcome aboard then, Remus!”

-

It took Remus most of the night to find his alley again. The partiers he passed on the streets became steadily more inebriated as the hours ticked towards dawn. Finally, they had all climbed into their taxis and the people left on the street were of a more threatening cast. A man with a thick, tangled beard shouted at him around three in the morning, but Remus kept walking, his hand over the pocket holding his wand.

Eventually, he found the right spot and was able to pull his robes out of the dumpster and drape them around himself, grateful for the extra warmth. He wedged himself into a corner, rough brick at his back, knees pulled up to his chest. The sky was beginning to lighten to the east. Remus didn’t have to be to ARIADNE’S until ten. He closed his eyes.

_James waved the snitch in his face. ‘That’s how you play the game of Quidditch,’ he yelled to the room at large. Marlene was jumping up and down, waving a bright red scarf. Someone slung an arm around his waist. Remus turned, only to get a face full of long black hair._

Remus opened his eyes, heart pounding. _Peter was yelling ‘200 to 10. 200 to 10!’_ He reached up and gripped at his hair, pulled until it hurt. The memory faded and he was twenty-one again, in an alley in Wales, hollowed out by hunger and hiding like a criminal.

On his walk back to the shop, Remus had plenty of time to worry at his untenable situation. It was three days until the full moon. He could already feel his skin stretched uncomfortably tight over his tendons. He needed to go back to his flat, he needed to scrape up enough money to pay for the Wolfsbane Potion, to have a roof over his head during the transformation. But instead of taking care of these practicalities, he was playing at being a shop boy. And why not? There was nothing, _no one,_ left of his old life. _‘Going feral, Moony?’_

He turned onto King Street, to see an ambulance and a police vehicle parked across the street from ARIADNE’S. People were clustered around several metres worth of police tape. Remus went to stand beside a large woman in a pantsuit.

“What happened?”

“Baker next door heard screaming.” The woman craned her neck, trying to see through the opened door of STICKS AND STONES: FINE FURNITURE. “Terrible screaming.” She shuddered appreciatively.

Two burly paramedics maneuvered a gurney out the door and down the stoop. The figure on the gurney was covered by a white sheet. They took the last step too quickly, the gurney wobbled, and a slender arm lolled out from under the sheet. The fingernails were printed Halloween orange. ‘ _Trouble’, Peter said, hands twitching at his sides, eyes frightened._

 “Trouble.”


End file.
